TECHNIPLAS® Elegant Solutions for Personalisation

Alongside colour, shape and material, lighting design is increasingly employed to position leading brands and clearly distinguish one vehicle from another. The car is now an extension of personal brand. “People identify with their car like they do their smart phone—expecting it to be highly customised and personalized”, according to Steffen Reuter, vice president for Innovation and Technology. Light creates atmosphere, enhances familiarity, and conveys a sense of elegance and quality.

To meet these standards, designers need innovative, customised solutions based on advanced products and superior technologies. TECHNIPLAS® has extensive experience in lighting and other forms of vehicle personalization, and works closely with its customers to develop solutions for the most demanding applications. With a long history of collaboration with premium OEMs, TECHNIPLAS® has a unique combination of competencies in design, material selection tooling, and multicomponent manufacturing. “We develop creative solutions for many different requirements. TECHNIPLAS® is a strong partner whose ideas are often ahead of the market,” says president and CEO Kim Korth.

Its Swiss-based operation pushes the boundaries of lighting technology and its expert engineers know how to impressively present cars and concept vehicles alike. Its elegant solutions exhibit expertise in materials, specific brightness distributions, and the seamless integration of lighting elements within vehicle components.

TECHNIPLAS® creates planar light sources by combining LEDs with creatively-shaped light guides. The challenge is often to create a homogenous light surface using a point-source LED, and the TECHNIPLAS® team is able to achieve this by creating micro-structures in the light guide surface; the company has developed a series of proprietary simulation software tools and lighting components that allow ultimate flexibility in lighting design. “Based on outcoupling and the scattering behaviour of the micro-structures, we can arrange these so that their exact distribution in the light guide results in a homogenous and diffuse lighting surface,” explains Reuter.

Many applications require highly homogenous planar light sources, and the TECHNIPLAS® software facilitates the creation of specific brightness distributions to achieve the desired effect. For example, on illuminated seat inserts in the Rinspeed ∑tos, certain symbols appear between the seat back and the headrest only when the backlight is on. Also spectacular are the extremely thin and practically invisible light guides serving as a hidden third brake light in the rear window of the Rinspeed ∑tos. “TECHNIPLAS® continues to deepen our competency in vehicle personalization and our lighting solutions are a great example of that,” Korth concludes.

About TECHNIPLAS®

TECHNIPLAS® has assembled some of the industry’s most trusted brands to build a world-class organization that makes us nimble and scalable globally. We lead with integrity, innovate with purpose, and drive operational excellence that delivers superior customer value. Learn more about the company at www.TECHNIPLAS.com.